Saturday, October 25, 2014

“Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.” The
more things change, the more they stay the same.This well-known epigram, written by
Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, was the first thing that came to mind when I
stumbled upon this series of now and then photographs. These portraits of
Columbia from Butler Library cast an interesting light on the notion of
cultural continuity unique to this academic environment.

The ghosts of
Columbia students past dressed significantly better. The grass was slightly
less groomed. Aside from these minor disparities, both sides of these images posit
a scene current students readily identify with. About seventy years have
elapsed between each side of the frame; yet, there is no overt clue – no telling
– of this. There is no profound marker that so many days have gone by, so many
students have come and gone, or that so much work has been done, books read, or
conversations had. There is no physical testament to this history. There is no indication
that this was past and this is present, nor evidence to suggest that Columbia
in 2014 is drastically different from Columbia in 1944. Meanwhile between these
stills, a lot has happened in this city and in the world. From World War II to
Vietnam, Woodstock, man on the moon, JFK, test tube babies, the Internet, and
9/11 – time has passed. Things have changed. Well, at least some things.

Could certain
behaviors and environments be timeless? How do we identify changes in time?Butler library is a truly unique place both
within the university and in general. Open twenty-four hours a day and seven
days a week, it is a space that is constantly inhabited. People cycle in and out.
They work there, socialize, often eat, and even occasionally sleep there. It is
a place with many niches that are commonly associated with different types of
disciplines and different types of people. The demographic of each room is
unique and the duration of one’s stay is highly variable.

What makes the
space truly interesting, however, is the way in which it alters senses of time.
The “Butler Bubble” is a space in and of itself, replete with its own language
and ethos of behavior. Time is measured in tasks accomplished or tasks left to
accomplish. “How long are you going to be here tonight?” I asked one of my
friends. He responded – as one usually does – by succinctly stating, “Until
this [paper] is done.”

Much like the
life inside a windowless casino, the passing of time does not penetrate this
great library. Rather than clocking hours, life inside Butler is “clocked” in
terms of the completion of “to-do” lists. Perhaps this non-temporal practice is
laden within the architecture itself. From the outside, the building appears to
have numerous windows. Inside, however, this is not the case. Between the
dimply-lit hallways and workspace areas void of natural light, visual access to
the external world is broken. The stacks ensconce individuals in a world of
only books. The study rooms hold a similar albeit warmer atmosphere. Even those
rooms that do contain windows rarely have a view of anything other than the
campus. There is neither cityscape nor pastoral landscape to gaze upon – only Columbia.

This sense of
timelessness – and disconnection – is perpetuated by the feelings one has upon
leaving the library. One typically enters in daylight and exits in darkness. As
you push through one of the main entrance doors and feel that first gust of
wind that sweeps across your face, you are awakened by a cacophony of sounds
coming from students rushing from place to place, the Broadway traffic and
other typical “street noises” that we have come to associate with living in New
York. You’re not sure how long you’ve been in the library, although your
stomach is usually letting you know that it’s been quite a while. You look
around you, take a deep breath and stumble home, revising the “to-do” list in
your head based upon your most recent accomplishments. On your journey home,
you check your cell phone and your temporal setting returns. What time is my
class tomorrow? How many hours of sleep am I going to get tonight? Until the
next venture into Butler. Rinse. Repeat.

[Photos Taken from Columbia Blue and White, www.bwog.com]By Gabby Borenstein

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Archaeology requires sustained attendance to form. This kind of disciplined attention has its challenges and rewards. The mystery of the process of observation is distilled in the zen koan: “A

mountain is a mountain/ A mountain is not a mountain/ A mountain is a mountain.” This poem seems to suggest a path from illusion to doubt to understanding - a kind of maturation - whereby in the final

stage we can hopefully retain some of the initial enchantment that caused us to begin to look in the first place. The question that has been occupying my mind lately has been: Where should I direct my gaze for the next few years? What should I study? There are practical considerations of course: geographical distance, available archival documentation, other authors' work in the subject. But then there's another side: How will this sustained scrutiny of exterior form affect my internal life?

Four years ago, I was asked by some friends in New York City to build a roof garden for them. At the

same time, I was pursuing a degree in industrial archaeology. Their request was timely. I had been

thinking about the integration of industrial and ecological forms, the adaptive re-use of industrial

sites as places of architectural and environmental synthesis, and since they lived in an old warehouse, I suggested that they install a green roof. I learned everything I could about water and root barriers,

filtration, drainage substrates, growth medium and the plants themselves, and began the process of

gaining approval from the building owners and enlisting green roof specialists and engineers. School

took me away from the work, but my friends continued the project, and now there is another small

patch of grasses, flowers, sedums and sempervivums on a roof in Manhattan. As soon as it was

installed, there were non-human visitors: butterflies, bees, many other insects. It pleases me to no end to witness an expanding rooftop wildlife corridor in the city, an archipelago of life.

When examining and thinking about industrial and pre-industrial structures, we are often confronted

with this material known as “wood,” but I think a more accurate term would be deceased arboreal

tissue. There is a biology within structure. Of course there are transient living beings, but there is also, embedded within this deceased arboreal tissue, a vast amount of information pertaining to environment, time, rhythm, tool-handedness, sound, fire, drought, soil characteristics, traffic, transportation, growth, harvesting techniques, all of which problematizes the distinction between artifact (an object made by humans) and ecofact (an object not made by humans but carrying cultural significance).

At the heart of these thoughts is the concept of cross-species identity. I identify with trees. Over the course of my life, having incorporated enough of their tissue into my lungs and fingers, it is time to offer something in return. This is all still in the realm of abstraction, but can perhaps be approached in a series of questions:

Can western red cedar separate poetry from philosophy? Is digital mutation familiar with redwood?

How does chlorophyll bear witness to genocide? Is a fluttering aspen leaf the genesis of rail

transportation? How does maple organize human thought? Will the thrush return to the same elm?
Is amaryllis partial to Kropotkin? What does microscopy gain from balsam fir (and how does birch tag along)?

Wednesday, October 8, 2014

‘It [the railway] transmutes a man from a traveler into a living
parcel.’

- Ruskin, The Complete Works (qtd. on p. 54 in Railway Journey by Wolfgang Schivelbusch)

Delancey Street Station 8:30:00

Delancey Street Station 8:30:05 p.m.

Delancey Street Station 8:30:11 p.m.

On any weekday, 5,465,034 people ride the New York City subway, boarding
one of the 6,235 trains at one of the 468 stations in New York City[1]. New York’s subway system
first opened in 1904. This innovation encouraged people to live and work in increasingly
separate locales.

Today, the average New Yorker
commutes 48 minutes to work, 13 minutes more than the national average[2]. In 2013, a report from
the US Census Bureau found that 8.1 percent—or 10.8 million—of American workers
commute more than an hour each way[3].

In this era of standardized
time we are expected to coordinate our activities with others. To achieve this,
we wear time-reckoning devices and carry phones equipped with GPS mapping
devices to ensure we take the most efficient routes possible. For all of my
awareness of time, I still feel “behind,” and as though I’m always rushing.

For example, even if I am
early, if I see the C train approaching the station, I will run to catch it. I’m
not alone—there are many others—panting and swinging their overstuffed tote
bags as they run down the platform.

My question is, why? Will shaving
three minutes from my commute have an impact on my day? Most often, the answer
is no. But I can’t help but view time economically, as something that is to be
spent wisely.

The act of commuting is a
strain. It is monotonous and the worst part is that it is unavoidably
time-consuming. 10.8 million Americans will spend 500 hours a year
commuting—that is over 20 days per year.

Can a commute be fruitful or
useful? Perhaps. Surely, it is not beautiful. Underground, there is no landscape
to gaze upon. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can claim a spot on the front of the train and peer through the front window. But most often, there is nothing to look
at all, except one’s reflection against the blackened window.

Under the ground, in the
tunnels, the passage of time is unobservable through nature. There is no
light. Enter at 125th Street in the late autumn afternoon sun, and
you will emerge, disoriented, in total darkness downtown.

Despite this, I know that
time is passing as we move forward along the map. I envision the landscape I am
traveling underneath.

The people on board drive me crazy but they keep me sane: the performers, lovers, children, businessmen, baseball players. It is the movement of bodies on and
off the train that reminds me that we are going places. I will say that there is something comforting in the movement of fellow-commuters, in being one of 5,465,034.

Thursday, September 25, 2014

“Everything begins and ends in the ‘real’ world, but that is
not ‘our’ world. ‘Our’ world is a shifting play of images, and maps that locate
and generate these images” (Gell 1992:241)

In my sink there is an assemblage of artifacts, a present of
traces or echoes of past presents and future pasts both habitual and indexical.
There are retentions and reproductions, the former being traces of food the
latter being the image of similar assemblages.As an archaeologist of the present having just finished reading Alfred
Gell’s The Anthropology of Time, how
do I approach this assemblage and begin to understand temporality as something
fundamentally real and avoid reducing it to the “human time” of
phenomenological perspective?

There is real time within the series and frames, within the
habit and boundaries of a shifting and stable assemblage. There is a location;
this is my apartment in New York City. It is September 25, 2014 at 3:35 am
(picture A), September 25, 2014 at 3:38 am (Picture B), September 25, 2014 at
4:07 am (Picture C).The process of
washing dishes was temporarily concluded on September 25, 2014 at 4:14 am
(pictures D and E).The assemblage only
exists as an assemblage within these frames, but is exists.

Picture A

Picture B

Picture C

Picture D

Picture E

One of the most serious questions for contemporary
archaeologists is that of temporality.How do we do and what is an archaeology of the present, of the
contemporaneous? Sitting though workshops, lectures, and presentations the one dilemma
that every contemporary archaeologist is forced to address and wrestle with is
that of a continuous present, both experientally and physically. This
positioning within the present makes establishing boundaries, categories,
frames of reference, and archaeological distance difficult.One approach to the paradox that is
contemporary archaeology is reducing it down to a phenomenological experience
that is composed of the impressions and perspectives of the archaeologist
(human time). This approach definitely has its uses, but typically only as a
means of capturing a present state, a tensed state, that as it comes into being
is rendered false an in need of revision. The conundrum is that human time is how we experience
and know the objective “real” time, and yet real time is always present in the
frames we create and tokens we identify.

Monday, December 2, 2013

According
to the old legend the Romans had a code of conduct obliging the one who takes
an oath to put his hand in the Bocca della Verità (Mouth of Truth) at the
church of Saint Mary in Cosmedin. If they were not telling the truth the mouth
would close and bite off the liars hand.

The
Bocca della Verità is at least 2200 years old and weighs about 1200 kilos. It
is a Pavonazzetto marble disk depicting a head, where the eyes, nostrils and
mouth are carved all the way through the 19 cm thick stone. According to
studies, it probably represents the god Océanus. He is the source of all
rivers, the entire sea, all springs and all deep wells according to Homer
(Iliad 21. 194 ff). This is why most scholars presume it to be the original
drain cover of the ancient temple of Jupiter or the temple of Hercules. The
temple was built using a similar circular domed rotunda or vault roof
construction as the Pantheon with an oculus, round open space, in the middle.
That would also explain the 2 holes on the side of the stone, which could have
been used for the horizontal fixing on a vaulted roof.After the demolition of
the temple the Bocca della Verità was placed in the narthex or portico of the
Santa Maria in Cosmedin church around 1650 where it stayed ever since and became
known as a place to take the test of truth.

To
put this in perspective, the temple of Hercules is directly across the street
from the Cosmedin church. In 1953, the general public was introduced to the
Bocca della Verità in the Audrey Hepburn film, Roman Holiday. I won’t go
into the significance and details of this scene. If you haven’t seen the movie
yet, then you really should! It is a classic. It’s Audrey Hepburn. It is filmed
in Rome.

Over
Thanksgiving I break I traveled to Roma to visit my sister who is completing
her study abroad semester. We did a lot of sight seeing and ate a lot of pizza
and gelato. It was a fantastic week. Of course there are long lines to see the
world famous ruins and art in Rome. We decided to go see the Mouth of Truth on
a whim and didn’t think there would be a line. On the contrary there was a line
extending out of the church. We waited and waited and when we got close enough
we realized everyone was talking about Roman Holiday and imitating the
scene in front of the Mouth.

Since
the line was pretty long, I had a lot of time to think about Charles Sanders
Peirce. I was thinking about the profound effect a popular film had on this
artifact. All of these people were excited to imitate this scene and reproduce
an iconic moment. Maybe it was the intense sugar high from all of the gelato
but I started thinking in Peircean triads.

First
we have the entity; the Mouth of Truth. Second, we it’s relation to the film.
Third, we have fanatical representation of an image. Now the artifact embodies
new meaning in relation to the film. According to Peirce “Now Thirdness is
nothing but the character of an object which embodies Betweenness of Mediation
in its simplest and most rudimentary form; and I use it as the name of that
element of the phenomenon which is predominant wherever Mediation is
predominant and which reaches its fullness in Representation” (Peirce 244).

The
Thirdness depicted below is not the image itself, but the element of image that
represents the Mediation of the Roman Holiday phenomenon. Moreover,
there are certainly hundreds of these images taken everyday representing this
same Thirdness. It is interesting to see how meaning of an entity can change
given each new relation to new entities or new meanings. Peirce certainly discusses
this phenomenon but I hadn't thought too much about it in archaeological
tourism.

Thirdness: Representation

References:

Peirce,
Charles S., and James Hoopes. Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic.
ChapelHill:
University of North Carolina, 1991. Print.